Christmas is a rotten hype & all we can do is ride it out
Letters of Noël
Before I dump this sack of letters on your doorstep and flee, please be aware: if you want to order a book or print from the Letters of Note shop, to be gift-wrapped and delivered somewhere in time for Christmas, you need to do it today or tomorrow1. Thanks!
Oh the hell of Christmas cards.
Evelyn Waugh
Letter to Lord Kinross
December 1953
(From The Letters of Evelyn Waugh)
I am the only living man whose wife gave him a telephone pole for Christmas. Around 23 December, Mary drove the wagon into the barn where I was working on a piece of furniture, and she said: “Come look, your present.” The wagon was loaded solid with six-foot chunks of a cedar pole that must have weathered under the aegis of the Nash Telephone people and their helpmates, the Central Maine Power people, for thirty years. The pole was nearly sixteen inches at the butt, and I sawed fifteen-inch lengths off it, and split off kindling. It flaked like cedar shakes with mallet and frow, and it sang like a xylophone under the touch of my inspired axe. Mary gave me the pole to remind us of our cabin days in the remote places, when the smell of cedar kindling taking flame was a sense of security. And defiance, too. This cedar is extra, because we wonder what was said to and by whom over the wires that were strung from it. Speculation as to this led to some extra drinks before supper on a night or two.
Edmund Smith
Letter to E. B. White
25th January 1965
(From Chickens, Gin, and a Maine Friendship: The Correspondence of E.B. White and Edmund Ware Smith)
on christmas eve our photographer was due to take pictures of the whole family, and that morning i discovered that the christmas tree we were supposed to get had been overlooked and we had no tree; finally, about five o’clock, the man arrived with two miserable little trees and said that was all he had left, and we should cut the branches off one and tie them on the other and it would be fine. you should have seen those bedraggled old things.
Shirley Jackson
Letter to her parents
7th January 1949
(From The Letters of Shirley Jackson)
Christmas was indescribable—that is to say, I could describe it but won’t. The high point dramatically was the Accident. The Christmas tree fell or rather was knocked over, with all its ornaments on, the morning of the day before Christmas. Kate and Brookie were playing house back behind it before breakfast, and Brookie forgot how much she has grown in the last few months and stood up. Over it went. Kate’s tears, sounding like Phèdre weeping for her lost innocence. She can’t bear breakage and there was a great deal of it, so thorough-going that you couldn’t deduce from the glass shards what had perished. Only one of any importance—the drummer-soldier, and his gun was broken off when he was brand new, showing that his destiny was short and tragic in any case. But when the tree had been stood up and tidied up, we saw to our great pleasure, that it was now right, for the first time. It had had too much on it. There is a moral of course, and like all morals it is better not pursued.
William Maxwell
Letter to Sylvia Townsend Warner
January 1961
(From The Element of Lavishness: Letters of William Maxwell and Sylvia Townsend Warner, 1938-1978)
Every year I hate Christmas more & more – I just want to go into my burrow until it’s over – and this year looks like being worse than most.
Philip Larkin
Letter to his mother
29th November 1964
(From Philip Larkin: Letters Home)
I am spending my Christmas in bed with influenza. It is very pleasant. I am warm, – everybody comes in looking blue with cold; an atmosphere of seasonable jocularity prevails, I am sure, in the dining-room, – and I am exempt from it. Kind people bring me grapes. I have a photograph of Virginia – not a very good photograph, – but better than nothing. I lie in bed, and watch the fire on the ceiling, and hear a clock strike, and think how delicious it will be when you come to stay here.
Vita Sackville-West
Letter to Virginia Woolf
Christmas Day 1926
(From Love Letters: Vita and Virginia)
Tell the children we decorated our tree here with bells, tinsel, dangles and spangles. Some of the dangles were extremely pretty, and sharp enough to cut a man’s head off.
Dalton Trumbo
Letter to Cleo Trumbo
27th December 1950
(From Additional Dialogue: Letters of Dalton Trumbo, 1942-1962)
Do not expect wit or sense in this letter, only the affection of a drugged and torpid mind. Oh an English Christmas! We are not Christians; we are not social; we have no part in the fabric of the world, but all the same, Christmas flattens us out like a steam roller; turkey, pudding, tips, waits, holly, good ·wishes, presents, sweets; so here we sit, on Boxing day, at Rodmell, over a wood fire, and I can only rouse myself by thinking of you.
Virginia Woolf
Letter to Jacques Raverat
26th December 1924
(From The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume III: 1923-1928)
I return your seasonal greetings card with contempt. May your hypocritical words choke you, and may they choke you early in the New Year, rather than later.
Kennedy Lindsay
Letter to Garret FitzGerald
December 1975
We’ve had quite a nice Christmas (I spent mine mostly with animals, which is a help); a complete attendance and a white countryside, with enough snow on the roads for sleigh riding behind an old horse named Fanny—not without reason. Many rather simple people presented us with many rather simple gifts, which pleased us inordinately (Kay has just this minute opened a box containing a venison pie and 2 cactus blossoms, from the lady who does our washing), and if it weren’t for the generally diseased condition of the world, we would feel that our cup runneth over. Ate our own goose and drank some American “burgundy.”
E. B. White
Letter to Gluyas Williams
Christmas Day 1940
(From Letters of E. B. White)
I feel about as exhausted verbally as a literary santa claus! I have just got through the most colossal job of writing my christmas letters: a huge project involving sending long letters with christmas cards to about 20 people and cards with short messages to about 10 more. I made an effort to choose special art cards (like the one I sent you) and witty line drawings (like Warren’s) to suit the individuals, and each time I wrote a letter, I took out the last letter from them, read it, thought about them, and about my sharing of life with them, and wrote a really particularly personal letter to them all.
Sylvia Plath
Letter to her mother
14th December 1955
(From Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume I: 1940–1956)
Christmas is a rotten hype & all we can do is ride it out.
Hunter S. Thompson
Letter to Hughes Rudd
13th December 1969
(From Fear and Loathing in America)
As I write this evening the air is filled with the ominous sounds of hostile aircraft passing to and from their objectives in London. Meanwhile at my gates, while the sky is at war and searchlights and guns go off in the near distance, while we see the fireworks over London 50 miles away, a little group of six boys are singing Christmas carols. Imagine the scene! They are singing the old carols unperturbed, and not always in tune, as their fathers and forefathers have sung them where they stand, generation after generation. ‘Hark! the Herald Angels’ to the accompaniment of sirens and AA guns!
These little carol singers, walking mile after mile in the darkened country lanes, singing their age-old carols, unmindful of the portents above, are proof that, like the rest of the nation, they are of the Spirit that knows not defeat.
R. D. Blumenfeld
Letter to The Times
27th December 1940
All photos are from Getty.
Alternatively, and far less urgently, you could gift someone a subscription to this newsletter. Click on ‘Gift’ at the top for options.
Somehow I relate to all of the letters and sentiments. It takes me back to the year my mother got me a Siamese kitten for Christmas. When our tree was finally decorated with lights blinking, the kitten jumped from the mantel over the fireplace into the tree, causing a great rattling and tinkling, screams from my mother and curses from my father who grabbed his rifle, aiming at the cat. My mother gave him a look that stopped him dead. To this day I wonder if he was serious.
These are wonderful to read!